"Go on, Rub me"

Why did Arthur Guilleminot make a giant butt plug from urine-based soap?

Recently featured at the NeoFuturist Dinner, this artist specialises in “queered approaches” to common household objects and daily rituals. His work is often overtly sexual, using objects associated with the fetish and BDSM community “as a way of exploring and bending sexual and gender conventions”.

After studying Design and Marketing, he began to play with gender, identity and pop culture, incorporating ravey tribal prints and vulgar symbolic objects into trippy rituals of his own making. He embraces “the awkward and uncanny”, using this piece, entitled “Go on, Rub me” as a multitool for discussion.

The soap itself is made using uric acid derived from the artist’s own urine and is a practical cleansing medium. However, provocatively shaped, it also questions our aversion to our own fetishes, asking whether the object is still perverse once the sight of it has been normalised. Through its use Guilleminot invites you to cleanse yourself of “pre-made ideas about sexuality.”

He describes this piece as a “Consumerist dirty pleasure” and an attempt to “wiggle the system” by creating an experience for the viewer that is playful, performative and otherworldly. In his work, he releases us from our heteronormative daily lives and welcomes us into his newly created “Heterotopia”.